«Integration» - a necessary evil

«Integration» - a necessary evil

Sistemi Informativi Aziendali – A.A. 2011/2012

Definition
 System (or Systems) Integration
 In information technology, systems integration is the
process of linking together different computing systems and
software applications physically or functionally, to act as a
coordinated whole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_integration

2 Sistemi Informativi Aziendali A.A. 2011/2012

The problem

Wilhelm Hasselbring et al. (2000), "Information system
integration", Communications of the ACM, Volume 43, Issue
6 (June 2000), Pages: 32-38


The problem

Defines the organizational structure and
the workflows for business rules and
processes.
It is a conceptual level expressed in terms
meaningful to actual users of application
systems

6 (June 2000), Pages: 32-38


The problem

Defines the actual implementation of the
business concepts in terms of enterprise
applications.
The central goal is to provide the “glue”
between the application domain described in
the business architecture and the technical
solutions described in the technology
architecture.

6 (June 2000), Pages: 32-38


The problem

Defines the information and communication
infrastructure.
At this layer, IT is challenged to achieve the
business requirements

6 (June 2000), Pages: 32-38


No Silos!
 Organizational units need to cooperate
 Cooperation at all levels is needed
 Cooperation is not “automatic” whenever different
approaches/standard/methods/information is used


Integration levels


Integration levels

Enabling different tools to
exchange data, information,
commands and status.


Integration levels

Creating meaningful
application workflows with the
integrated data and services


Integration levels

EAI EDI
SOA
Creating meaningful
application workflows with the
integrated data and services
ERP WS
XML
interoperation


Integration levels

Support business processes
involving different units, thanks
to the integration of their
enterprise systems


Complexity Boosters


Complexity Boosters

• Different servers
• Same company / data center
• Different company
• Different applications
• Calling “remote” procedures
• Stub+marshal+execute
• Time-changing distributed architecture


• Technical level:
• different hardware platforms,
Complexity Boosters
• different operating systems,
• different database management systems
• different programming languages.
• Conceptual level
• different programming and data models
• different understanding and modeling of the
same real-world concepts,
• the same name to denote different
concepts (homonyms)
• different names for the same concept
(synonyms)


The “cutting game”


Integration styles
 File Transfer
 Have each application produce files of shared data for others
to consume, and consume files that others have produced
 Shared database
 Have the applications store the data they wish to share in a
common database
 Remote Procedure Invocation
 Have each application expose some of its procedures so that
they can be invoked remotely, and have applications invoke
those to run behavior and exchange data
 Messaging
 Have each application connect to a common messaging system,
and exchange data and invoke behavior using messages
http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/IntegrationStylesIntro.html

Available Tecnical solutions
 Messaging oriented middleware; messaging patterns
 Interface based middleware; distributed objects
 Database-Oriented Middleware
 XML; XML based languages and standards
 Service Oriented Architecture; Web Services
 Web 2.0: Web APIs, REST, Mashup
 REST; RESTful Web Services; REST vs. Web Services
 Data/information integration and EII
 Presentation integration and portal
 Process (oriented) integration
 Identity integration; Single Sign-On
CIS 8020: Systems Integration, Georgia State University
http://www2.cis.gsu.edu/cis/program/syllabus/graduate/cis8020.asp


Legacy systems can’t be killed


Legacy systems integration

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-tip-leg/index.html


Data-level integration
 Access of legacy databases or files by either session beans
or entity beans
 Access to newly developed data feeds, produced by the
legacy system, for the specific purpose of data access
 XML is often used
 Straightforward and quick to implement
 But:
 increased data coupling between applications => increasing
maintenance burden
 inability to access important behavior (data validation, critical
business rules…)
 need to write significant data cleansing/formatting code for poorly
designed data-increased data coupling between applications


Application-interface integration
 leverage the application programming interfaces (APIs)
exposed by your applications to access both the data and
the functionality encapsulated by legacy systems
 Ex: C-APIs that you can access via Java Native Interface (JNI)
code (SAP, PeopleSoft)
 But:
 In-house software rarely has a defined API
 APIs may be limited in scope / may not offer the behavior that
you need (or in a manner that you need it)
 APIs are often function-oriented in nature and not object-
oriented


Method-level integration
 Business logic is shared as a collection of shared methods,
or operations that your software can invoke
 Ex.: update customer data, validate a credit card transaction,
deposit money into a bank account
 Provides fine-grained access to common business
functions
 Easy to invoke by many programming languages
 But:
 Fine-grained implies difficult to support transactions
 Difficult to support common services (ex: security)


User interface-level integration
 accessing existing applications through their user
interfaces
 screen scraping: user keystrokes are simulated
 Common approach for legacy integration
 But:
 Slow
 Changes to the legacy user interface require changes to your
code


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«Integration» - a necessary evil

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